He adopted the first two of these suggestions. John A. Cockerill was still under contract with Joseph Pulitzer and could not accept for a year or more. He finally did accept and died in the Bennett service. John Russell Young took the editorial page and was making it "hum" when a most unaccountable thing happened. I was amazed to receive an invitation to a dinner he had tendered and was about to give to the quondam Virginian and just elected New York Justice Roger A. Pryor. "Is Young gone mad," I said to myself, "or can he have forgotten that the one man of all the world whom the House of Bennett can never forget, or forgive, is Roger A. Pryor?"

The Bennett-Pry or quarrel had been a cause celebre when John Young was night editor of the Philadelphia Press and I was one of its Washington correspondents. Nothing so virulent had ever passed between an editor and a Congressman. In one of his speeches Pryor had actually gone the length of rudely referring to Mrs. James Gordon Bennett.

The dinner was duly given. But it ended John's connection with the Herald and his friendly relations with the owner of the Herald. The incident might be cited as among "The Curiosities of Journalism," if ever a book with that title is written. John's "break" was so bad that I never had the heart to ask him how he could have perpetrated it.



III

The making of an editor is a complex affair. Poets and painters are said to be born. Editors and orators are made. Many essential elements enter into the editorial fabrication; need to be concentrated upon and embodied by a single individual, and even, with these, environment is left to supply the opportunity and give the final touch.

Aptitude, as the first ingredient, goes without saying of every line of human endeavor. We have the authority of the adage for the belief that it is not possible to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Yet have I known some unpromising tyros mature into very capable workmen.

The modern newspaper, as we know it, may be fairly said to have been the invention of James Gordon Bennett, the elder. Before him there were journals, not newspapers. When he died he had developed the news scheme in kind, though not in the degree that we see so elaborate and resplendent in New York and other of the leading centers of population. Mr. Bennett had led a vagrant and varied life when he started the Herald. He had been many things by turns, including a writer of verses and stories, but nothing very successful nor very long. At length he struck a central idea—a really great, original idea—the idea of printing the news of the day, comprising the History of Yesterday, fully and fairly, without fear or favor. He was followed by Greeley and Raymond—making a curious and very dissimilar triumvirate—and, at longer range, by Prentice and Forney, by Bowles and Dana, Storey, Medill and Halstead. All were marked men; Greeley a writer and propagandist; Raymond a writer, declaimer and politician; Prentice a wit and partisan; Dana a scholar and an organizer; Bowles a man both of letters and affairs. The others were men of all work, writing and fighting their way to the front, but possessing the "nose for news," using the Bennett formula and rescript as the basis of their serious efforts, and never losing sight of it. Forney had been a printer. Medill and Storey were caught young by the lure of printer's ink. Bowles was born and reared in the office of the Springfield Republican, founded by his father, and Halstead, a cross betwixt a pack horse and a race horse, was broken to harness before he was out of his teens.

Assuming journalism, equally with medicine and law, to be a profession, it is the only profession in which versatility is not a disadvantage. Specialism at the bar, or by the bedside, leads to perfection and attains results. The great doctor is the great surgeon or the great prescriptionist—he cannot be great in both—and the great lawyer is rarely great, if ever, as counselor and orator.



The great editor is by no means the great writer. But he ought to be able to write and must be a judge of writing. The newspaper office is a little kingdom. The great editor needs to know and does know every range of it between the editorial room, the composing room and the pressroom. He must hold well in hand everybody and every function, having risen, as it were, step-by-step from the ground floor to the roof. He should be level-headed, yet impressionable; sympathetic, yet self-possessed; able quickly to sift, detect and discriminate; of various knowledge, experience and interest; the cackle of the adjacent barnyard the noise of the world to his eager mind and pliant ear. Nothing too small for him to tackle, nothing too great, he should keep to the middle of the road and well in rear of the moving columns; loving his art—for such it is—for art's sake; getting his sufficiency, along with its independence, in the public approval and patronage, seeking never anything further for himself. Disinterestedness being the soul of successful journalism, unselfish devotion to every noble purpose in public and private life, he should say to preferment, as to bribers, "get behind me, Satan." Whitelaw Reid, to take a ready and conspicuous example, was a great journalist, but rather early in life he abandoned journalism for office and became a figure in politics and diplomacy so that, as in the case of Franklin, whose example and footsteps in the main he followed, he will be remembered rather as the Ambassador than as the Editor.

More and more must these requirements be fulfilled by the aspiring journalist. As the world passes from the Rule of Force—force of prowess, force of habit, force of convention—to the Rule of Numbers, the daily journal is destined, if it survives as a power, to become the teacher—the very Bible—of the people. The people are already beginning to distinguish between the wholesome and the meretricious in their newspapers. Newspaper owners, likewise, are beginning to realize the value of character. Instances might be cited where the public, discerning some sinister but unseen power behind its press, has slowly yet surely withdrawn its confidence and support. However impersonal it pretends to be, with whatever of mystery it affects to envelop itself, the public insists upon some visible presence. In some States the law requires it. Thus "personal journalism" cannot be escaped, and whether the "one-man power" emanates from the Counting Room or the Editorial Room, as they are called, it must be clear and answerable, responsive to the common weal, and, above all, trustworthy.



IV

John Weiss Forney was among the most conspicuous men of his time. He was likewise one of the handsomest. By nature and training a journalist, he played an active, not to say an equivocal, part in public life-at the outset a Democratic and then a Republican leader.

Born in the little town of Lancaster, it was his mischance to have attached himself early in life to the fortunes of Mr. Buchanan, whom he long served with fidelity and effect. But when Mr. Buchanan came to the Presidency, Forney, who aspired first to a place in the Cabinet, which was denied him, and then to a seat in the Senate, for which he was beaten—through flagrant bribery, as the story ran—was left out in the cold. Thereafter he became something of a political adventurer.

The days of the newspaper "organ" approached their end. Forney's occupation, like Othello's, was gone, for he was nothing if not an organ grinder. Facile with pen and tongue, he seemed a born courtier—a veritable Dalgetty, whose loyal devotion to his knight-at-arms deserved better recognition than the cold and wary Pennsylvania chieftain was willing to give. It is only fair to say that Forney's character furnished reasonable excuse for this neglect and apparent ingratitude. The row between them, however, was party splitting. As the friend and backer of Douglas, and later along a brilliant journalistic soldier of fortune, Forney did as much as any other man to lay the Democratic party low.

I can speak of him with a certain familiarity and authority, for I was one of his "boys." I admired him greatly and loved him dearly. Most of the young newspaper men about Philadelphia and Washington did so. He was an all-around modern journalist of the first class. Both as a newspaper writer and creator and manager, he stood upon the front line, rating with Bennett and Greeley and Raymond. He first entertained and then cultivated the thirst for office, which proved the undoing of Greeley and Raymond, and it proved his undoing. He had a passion for politics. He would shine in public life. If he could not play first fiddle he would take any other instrument. Thus failing of a Senatorship, he was glad to get the Secretaryship of the Senate, having been Clerk of the House.

He was bound to be in the orchestra. In those days newspaper independence was little known. Mr. Greeley was willing to play bottle-holder to Mr. Seward, Mr. Prentice to Mr. Clay. James Gordon Bennett, the elder, and later his son, James Gordon Bennett, the younger, challenged this kind of servility. The Herald stood at the outset of its career manfully in the face of unspeakable obloquy against it. The public understood it and rose to it. The time came when the elder Bennett was to attain official as well as popular recognition. Mr. Lincoln offered him the French mission and Mr. Bennett declined it. He was rich and famous, and to another it might have seemed a kind of crowning glory. To him it seemed only a coming down—a badge of servitude—a lowering of the flag of independent journalism under which, and under which alone, he had fought all his life.

Charles A. Dana was not far behind the Bennetts in his independence. He well knew what parties and politicians are. The most scholarly and accomplished of American journalists, he made the Sun "shine for all," and, during the years of his active management, a most prosperous property. It happened that whilst I was penny-a-lining in New York I took a piece of space work—not very common in those days—to the Tribune and received a few dollars for it. Ten years later, meeting Mr. Dana at dinner, I recalled the circumstance, and thenceforward we became the best of friends. Twice indeed we had runabouts together in foreign lands. His house in town, and the island home called Dorsoris, which he had made for himself, might not inaptly be described as very shrines of hospitality and art, the master of the house a virtuoso in music and painting no less than in letters. One might meet under his roof the most diverse people, but always interesting and agreeable people. Perhaps at times he carried his aversions a little too far. But he had reasons for them, and a man of robust temperament and habit, it was not in him to sit down under an injury, or fancied injury. I never knew a more efficient journalist. What he did not know about a newspaper, was scarcely worth knowing.

In my day Journalism has made great strides. It has become a recognized profession. Schools of special training are springing up here and there. Several of the universities have each its College of Journalism. The tendency to discredit these, which was general and pronounced at the start, lowers its tone and grows less confident.

Assuredly there is room for special training toward the making of an editor. Too often the newspaper subaltern obtaining promotion through aptitudes peculiarly his own, has failed to acquire even the most rudimentary knowledge of his art. He has been too busy seeking "scoops" and doing "stunts" to concern himself about perspectives, principles, causes and effects, probable impressions and consequences, or even to master the technical details which make such a difference in the preparation of matter intended for publication and popular perusal. The School of Journalism may not be always able to give him the needful instruction. But it can set him in the right direction and better prepare him to think and act for himself.



Chapter the Twenty-Eighth

Bullies and Braggarts—Some Kentucky Illustrations—The Old Galt House—The Throckmortons—A Famous Sugeon—"Old Hell's Delight"



I

I do not believe that the bully and braggart is more in evidence in Kentucky and Texas than in other Commonwealths of the Union, except that each is by the space writers made the favorite arena of his exploits and adopted as the scene of the comic stories told at his expense. The son-of-a-gun from Bitter Creek, like the "elegant gentleman" from the Dark and Bloody Ground, represents a certain type to be found more or less developed in each and every State of the Union. He is not always a coward. Driven, as it were, to the wall, he will often make good.

He is as a rule in quest of adventures. He enters the village from the countryside and approaches the melee. "Is it a free fight?" says he. Assured that it is, "Count me in," says he. Ten minutes later, "Is it still a free fight?" he says, and, again assured in the affirmative, says he, "Count me out."

Once the greatest of bullies provoked old Aaron Pennington, "the strongest man in the world," who struck out from the shoulder and landed his victim in the middle of the street. Here he lay in a helpless heap until they carted him off to the hospital, where for a day or two he flickered between life and death. "Foh God," said Pennington, "I barely teched him."

This same bully threatened that when a certain mountain man came to town he would "finish him." The mountain man came. He was enveloped in an old-fashioned cloak, presumably concealing his armament, and walked about ostentatiously in the proximity of his boastful foeman, who remained as passive as a lamb. When, having failed to provoke a fight, he had taken himself off, an onlooker said: "Bill, I thought you were going to do him up?"

"But," says Bill, "did you see him?"

"Yes, I saw him. What of that?"

"Why," exclaimed the bully, "that man was a walking arsenal."

Aaron Pennington, the strong man just mentioned, was, in his younger days, a river pilot. Billy Hite, a mite of a man, was clerk. They had a disagreement, when Aaron told Billy that if he caught him on "the harrican deck," he would pitch him overboard. The next day Billy appeared whilst Aaron, off duty, was strolling up and down outside the pilot-house, and strolled offensively in his wake. Never a hostile glance or a word from Aaron. At last, tired of dumb show, Billy broke forth with a torrent of imprecation closing with "When are you going to pitch me off the boat, you blankety-blank son-of-a-gun and coward?"

Aaron Pennington was a brave man. He was both fearless and self-possessed. He paused, gazed quizzically at his little tormentor, and says he: "Billy, you got a pistol, and you want to get a pretext to shoot me, and I ain't going to give it to you."



II

Among the hostels of Christendom the Galt House, of Louisville, for a long time occupied a foremost place and held its own. It was burned to the ground fifty years ago and a new Galt House was erected, not upon the original site, but upon the same street, a block above, and, although one of the most imposing buildings in the world, it could never be made to thrive. It stands now a rather useless encumbrance—a whited sepulchre—a marble memorial of the Solid South and the Kentucky that was, on whose portal might truthfully appear the legend:

"A jolly place it was in days of old, But something ails it now"

Aris Throckmorton, its manager in the Thirties, the Forties and the Fifties, was a personality and a personage. The handsomest of men and the most illiterate, he exemplified the characteristics and peculiarities of the days of the river steamer and the stage coach, when "mine host" felt it his duty to make the individual acquaintance of his patrons and each and severally to look after their comfort. Many stories are told at his expense; of how he made a formal call upon Dickens—it was, in point of fact, Marryatt—in his apartment, to be coolly told that when its occupant wanted him he would ring for him; and of how, investigating a strange box which had newly arrived from Florida, the prevailing opinion being that the live animal within was an alligator, he exclaimed, "Alligator, hell; it's a scorponicum." He died at length, to be succeeded by his son John, a very different character. And thereby hangs a tale.

John Throckmorton, like Aris, his father, was one of the handsomest of men. Perhaps because he was so he became the victim of one of the strangest of feminine whimsies and human freaks. There was a young girl in Louisville, named Ellen Godwin. Meeting him at a public ball she fell violently in love with him. As Throckmorton did not reciprocate this, and refused to pursue the acquaintance, she began to dog his footsteps. She dressed herself in deep black and took up a position in front of the Galt House, and when he came out and wherever he went she followed him. No matter how long he stayed, when he reappeared she was on the spot and watch. He took himself away to San Francisco. It was but the matter of a few weeks when she was there, too. He hied him thence to Liverpool, and as he stepped upon the dock there she was. She had got wind of his going and, having caught an earlier steamer, preceded him.

Finally the War of Sections arrived. John Throckmorton became a Confederate officer, and, being able to keep her out of the lines, he had a rest of four years. But, when after the war he returned to Louisville, the quarry began again.

He was wont to call her "Old Hell's Delight." Finally, one night, as he was passing the market, she rushed out and rained upon him blow after blow with a frozen rabbit.

Then the authorities took a hand. She was arraigned for disorderly conduct and brought before the Court of Police. Then the town, which knew nothing of the case and accepted her goings on as proof of wrong, rose; and she had a veritable ovation, coming away with flying colors. This, however, served to satisfy her. Thenceforward she desisted and left poor John Throckmorton in peace.

I knew her well. She used once in a while to come and see me, having some story or other to tell. On one occasion I said to her: "Ellen, why do you pursue this man in this cruel way? What possible good can it do you?" She looked me straight in the eye and slowly replied: "Because I love him."

I investigated the case closely and thoroughly and was assured, as he had assured me, that he had never done her the slightest wrong. She had, on occasion, told me the same thing, and this I fully believed.

He was a man, every inch of him, and a gentleman through and through—the very soul of honor in his transactions of every sort—most highly respected and esteemed wherever he was known—yet his life was made half a failure and wholly unhappy by this "crazy Jane," the general public taking appearances for granted and willing to believe nothing good of one who, albeit proud and honorable, held defiantly aloof, disdaining self-defense.

On the whole I have not known many men more unfortunate than John Throckmorton, who, but for "Old Hell's Delight," would have encountered little obstacle to the pursuit of prosperity and happiness.



III

Another interesting Kentuckian of this period was John Thompson Gray. He was a Harvard man—a wit, a scholar, and, according to old Southern standards, a chevalier. Handsome and gifted, he had the disastrous misfortune just after leaving college to kill his friend in a duel—a mortal affair growing, as was usual in those days, out of a trivial cause—and this not only saddened his life, but, in its ambitious aims, shadowed and defeated it. His university comrades had fully counted on his making a great career. Being a man of fortune, he was able to live like a gentleman without public preferment, and this he did, except to his familiars aloof and sensitive to the last.

William Preston, the whilom Minister to Spain and Confederate General, and David Yandell, the eminent surgeon, were his devoted friends, and a notable trio they made. Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester and I—very much younger men—sat at their feet and immensely enjoyed their brilliant conversation.

Dr. Yandell was not only as proclaimed by Dr. Gross and Dr. Sayre the ablest surgeon of his day, but he was also a gentleman of varied experience and great social distinction. He had studied long in Paris and was the pal of John Howard Payne, the familiar friend of Lamartine, Dumas and Lemaitre. He knew Beranger, Hugo and Balzac. It would be hard to find three Kentuckians less provincial, more unaffected, scintillant and worldly wise than he and William Preston and John Thompson Gray.

Indeed the list of my acquaintances—many of them intimates—some of them friends—would be, if recounted, a long one, not mentioning the foreigners, embracing a diverse company all the way from Chunkey Towles to Grover Cleveland, from Wake Holman to John Pierpont Morgan, from John Chamberlin to Thomas Edison. I once served as honorary pall-bearer to a professional gambler who was given a public funeral; a man who had been a gallant Confederate soldier; whom nature intended for an artist, and circumstance diverted into a sport; but who retained to the last the poetic fancy and the spirit of the gallant, leaving behind him, when he died, like a veritable cavalier, chiefly debts and friends. He was not a bad sort in business, as the English say, nor in conviviality. But in fighting he was "a dandy." The goody-goody philosophy of the namby-pamby takes an extreme and unreal view of life. It flies to extremes. There are middle men. Travers used to describe one of these, whom he did not wish particularly to emphasize, as "a fairly clever son-of-a-gun."



Chapter the Twenty-Ninth

About Political Conventions, State and National—"Old Ben Butler"—His Appearance as a Trouble-Maker in the Democratic National Convention of 1892—Tarifa and the Tariff—Spain as a Frightful Example



I

I have had a liberal education in party convocations, State and national. In those of 1860 I served as an all-around newspaper reporter. A member of each National Democratic Convention from 1876 to 1892, presiding over the first, and in those of 1880 and 1888 chosen chairman of the Resolutions Committee, I wrote many of the platforms and had a decisive voice in all of them.

In 1880 I had stood for the renomination of "the Old Ticket," that is, Tilden and Hendricks, making the eight-to-seven action of the Electoral Tribunal of 1877 in favor of Hayes and Wheeler the paramount issue. It seems strange now that any one should have contested this. Yet it was stoutly contested. Mr. Tilden settled all dispute by sending a letter to the convention declining to be a candidate. In answer to this I prepared a resolution of regret to be incorporated in the platform. It raised stubborn opposition. David A. Wells and Joseph Pulitzer, who were fellow members of the committee, were with me in my contention, but the objection to making it a part of the platform grew so pronounced that they thought I had best not insist upon it.

The day wore on and the latent opposition seemed to increase. I had been named chairman of the committee and had at a single sitting that morning written a completed platform. Each plank of this was severally and closely scrutinized. It was well into the afternoon before we reached the plank I chiefly cared about. When I read this the storm broke. Half the committee rose against it. At the close, with more heat than was either courteous or tactful, I said: "Gentlemen, I wish to do no more than bid farewell to a leader who four years ago took the Democratic party at its lowest fortunes and made it a power again. He is well on his way to the grave. I would place a wreath of flowers on that grave. I ask only this of you. Refuse me, and by God, I will go to that mob yonder and, dead or alive, nominate him, and you will be powerless to prevent!"

Mr. Barksdale, of Mississippi, a suave gentleman, who had led the dissenters, said, "We do not refuse you. But you say that we 'regret' Mr. Tilden's withdrawal. Now I do not regret it, nor do those who agree with me. Could you not substitute some other expression?"

"I don't stand on words," I answered. "What would you suggest?"

Mr. Barksdale said: "Would not the words 'We have received with the deepest sensibility Mr. Tilden's letter of withdrawal,' answer your purpose?"

"Certainly," said I, and the plank in the platform, as it was amended, was adopted unanimously.

Mr. Tilden did not die. He outlived all his immediate rivals. Four years later, in 1884, his party stood ready again to put him at its head. In nominating Mr. Cleveland it thought it was accepting his dictation reenforced by the enormous majority—nearly 200,000—by which Mr. Cleveland, as candidate for Governor, had carried New York in the preceding State election. Yet, when the votes in the presidential election came to be counted, he carried it, if indeed he carried it at all, by less than 1,100 majority, the result hanging in the balance for nearly a week.



II

In the convention of 1884, which met at Chicago, we had a veritable monkey-and-parrot time. It was next after the schism in Congress between the Democratic factions led respectively by Carlisle and Randall, Carlisle having been chosen Speaker of the House over Randall.

Converse, of Ohio, appeared in the Platform Committee representing Randall, and Morrison, of Illinois, and myself, representing Carlisle. I was bent upon making Morrison chairman of the committee. But it was agreed that the chairmanship should be held in abeyance until the platform had been formulated and adopted. The subcommittee to whom the task was delegated sat fifty-one hours without a break before its work was completed. Then Morrison was named chairman. It was arranged thereafter between Converse, Morrison and myself that when the agreed report was made, Converse and I should have each what time he required to say what was desired in explanation, I to close the debate and move the previous question. At this point General Butler sidled up. "Where do I come in?" he asked.

"You don't get in at all, you blasted old sinner," said Morrison.

"I have scriptural warrant," General Butler said. "Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treadeth the corn."

"All right, old man," said Morrison, good-humoredly, "take all the time you want."

In his speech before the convention General Butler was not at his happiest, and in closing he gave me a particularly good opening. "If you adopt this platform of my friend Watterson," he said, "God may help you, but I can't."

I was standing by his side, and, it being my turn, he made way for me, and I said: "During the last few days and nights of agreeable, though rather irksome, intercourse, I have learned to love General Butler, but I must declare that in an option between him and the Almighty I have a prejudice in favor of God."

In his personal intercourse, General Butler was the most genial of men. The subcommittee in charge of the preparation of a platform held its meetings in the drawing-room of his hotel apartment, and he had constituted himself our host as well as our colleague. I had not previously met him. It was not long after we came together before he began to call me by my Christian name. At one stage of the proceedings when by substituting one word for another it looked as though we might reach an agreement, he said to me: "Henry, what is the difference between 'exclusively for public purposes' and 'a tariff for revenue only'?"

"I know of none," I answered.

"Do you think that the committee have found you out?"

"No, I scarcely think so."

"Then I will see that they do," and he proceeded in his peculiarly subtle way to undo all that we had done, prolonging the session twenty-four hours.

He was an able man and a lovable man. The missing ingredient was serious belief. Just after the nomination of the Breckinridge and Lane Presidential ticket in 1860, I heard him make an ultra-Southern speech from Mr. Breckinridge's doorway. "What do you think of that?" I asked Andrew Johnson, who stood by me, and Johnson answered sharply, with an oath: "I never like a man to be for me more than I am for myself." I have been told that even at home General Butler could never acquire the public confidence. In spite of his conceded mentality and manliness he gave the impression of being something of an intellectual sharper.

He was charitable, generous and amiable. The famous New Orleans order which had made him odious to the women of the South he had issued to warn bad women and protect good women. Assuredly he did not foresee the interpretation that would be put upon it. He was personally popular in Congress. When he came to Washington he dispensed a lavish hospitality. Such radical Democrats as Beck and Knott did not disdain his company, became, indeed, his familiars. Yet, curious to relate, a Kentucky Congressman of the period lost his seat because it was charged and proven that he had ridden in a carriage to the White House with the Yankee Boanerges on a public occasion.



III

Mere party issues never counted with me. I have read too much and seen too much. At my present time of life they count not at all. I used to think that there was a principle involved between the dogmas of Free Trade and Protection as they were preached by their respective attorneys. Yet what was either except the ancient, everlasting scheme—

—"The good old role—the simple plan, That they should take who have the power And they should keep who can."

How little wisdom one man may get from another man's counsels, one nation may get from another nation's history, can be partly computed when we reflect how often our personal experience has failed in warning admonition.

Temperament and circumstance do indeed cut a prodigious figure in life. Traversing the older countries, especially Spain, the most illustrative, the wayfarer is met at all points by what seems not merely the logic of events, but the common law of the inevitable. The Latin of the Sixteenth century was a recrudescence of the Roman of the First. He had not, like the Mongolian, lived long enough to become a stoic. He was mainly a cynic and an adventurer. Thence he flowered into a sybarite. Coming to great wealth with the discoveries of Columbus and the conquests of Pizarro and Cortes, he proceeded to enjoy its fruits according to his fancy and the fashion of the times.

He erected massive shrines to his deities. He reared noble palaces. He built about his cathedrals and his castles what were then thought to be great cities, walled and fortified. He was, for all his self-sufficiency and pride, short-sighted; and yet, until they arrived, how could he foresee the developments of artillery? They were as hidden from him as three centuries later the wonders of electricity were hidden from us.

I was never a Free Trader. I stood for a tariff for revenue as the least oppressive and safest support of Government. The protective system in the United States, responsible for our unequal distribution of wealth, took at least its name from Spain, and the Robber Barons, as I used to call the Protectionists of Pennsylvania, were not of immediate German origin.

Truth to say, both on land and water Spain has made a deal of history, and the front betwixt Gibraltar and the Isle of San Fernando—Tangier on one side and the Straits of Tarifa on the other—Cape Trafalgar, where Nelson fought the famous battle, midway between them—has had its share.

Tarifa! What memories it invokes! In the olden and golden days of primitive man, before corporation lawyers had learned how to frame pillaging statutes, and rascally politicians to bamboozle confiding constituencies—thus I used to put it—the gentle pirates of Tarifa laid broad and deep the foundations for the Protective System in the United States.

It was a fruitful as well as a congenial theme, and I rang all the changes on it. To take by law from one man what is his and give it to another man who has not earned it and has no right to it, I showed to be an invention of the Moors, copied by the Spaniards and elevated thence into political economy by the Americans. Tarifa took its name from Tarif-Ben-Malik, the most enterprising Robber Baron of his day, and thus the Lords of Tarifa were the progenitors of the Robber Barons of the Black Forest, New England and Pittsburgh. Tribute was the name the Moors gave their robbery, which was open and aboveboard. The Coal Kings, the Steel Kings and the Oil Kings of the modern world have contrived to hide the process; but in Spain the palaces of their forefathers rise in lonely and solemn grandeur just as a thousand years hence the palaces upon the Fifth Avenue side of Central Park and along Riverside Drive, not to mention those of the Schuylkill and the Delaware, may become but roosts for bats and owls, and the chronicler of the Anthropophagi, "whose heads do reach the skies," may tell how the voters of the Great Republic were bought and sold with their own money, until "Heaven released the legions north of the North Pole, and they swooped down and crushed the pulpy mass beneath their avenging snowshoes."

The gold that was gathered by the Spaniards and fought over so valiantly is scattered to the four ends of the earth. It may be as potent to-day as then; but it does not seem nearly so heroic. A good deal of it has found its way to London, which a short century and a half ago "had not," according to Adam Smith, "sufficient wealth to compete with Cadiz." We have had our full share without fighting for it. Thus all things come to him who contrives and waits.

Meanwhile, there are "groups" and "rings." And, likewise, "leaders" and "bosses." What do they know or care about the origins of wealth; about Venice; about Cadiz; about what is said of Wall Street? The Spanish Main was long ago stripped of its pillage. The buccaneers took themselves off to keep company with the Vikings. Yet, away down in those money chests, once filled with what were pieces of eight and ducats and doubloons, who shall say that spirits may not lurk and ghosts walk, one old freebooter wheezing to another old freebooter: "They order these things better in the 'States.'"



IV

I have enjoyed hugely my several sojourns in Spain. The Spaniard is unlike any other European. He may not make you love him. But you are bound to respect him.

There is a mansion in Seville known as The House of Pontius Pilate because part of the remains of the abode of the Roman Governor was brought from Jerusalem and used in a building suited to the dignity of a Spanish grandee who was also a Lord of Tarifa. The Duke of Medina Celi, its present owner, is a lineal scion of the old piratical crew. The mansion is filled with the fruits of many a foray. There are plunder from Naples, where one ancestor was Viceroy, and treasures from the temples of the Aztecs and the Incas, where two other ancestors ruled. Every coping stone and pillar cost some mariner of the Tarifa Straits a pot of money.

Its owner is a pauper. A carekeeper shows it for a peseta a head. To such base uses may we come at last. Yet Seville basks in the sun and smiles on the flashing waters of the Guadalquivir, and Cadiz sits serene upon the green hillsides of San Sebastian, just as if nothing had ever happened; neither the Barber and Carmen, nor Nelson and Byron; the past but a phantom; the present the prosiest of prose-poems.

There are canny Spaniards even as there are canny Scots, who grow rich and prosper; but there is never a Spaniard who does not regard the political fabric, and the laws, as fair game, the rule being always "devil take the hindmost," community of interests nowhere. "The good old vices of Spain," that is, the robbing of the lesser rogue by the greater in regulated gradations all the way from the King to the beggar, are as prevalent and as vital as ever they were. Curiously enough, a tiny stream of Hebraic blood and Moorish blood still trickles through the Spanish coast towns. It may be traced through the nomenclature in spite of its Castilian prefigurations and appendices, which would account for some of the enterprise and activity that show themselves, albeit only by fits and starts.



Chapter the Thirtieth

The Makers of the Republic—Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster—The Proposed League of Nations—The Wilsonian Incertitude—The "New Freedom"



I

The makers of the American Republic range themselves in two groups—Washington, Franklin and Jefferson—Clay, Webster and Lincoln—each of whom, having a genius peculiarly his own, gave himself and his best to the cause of national unity and independence.

In a general way it may be said that Washington created and Lincoln saved the Union. But along with Washington and Lincoln, Clay makes a good historic third, for it was the masterful Kentuckian who, joining rare foresight to surpassing eloquence and leading many eminent men, including Webster, was able to hold the legions of unrest at bay during the formative period.

There are those who call these great men "back numbers," who tell us we have left the past behind us and entered an epoch of more enlightened progress—who would displace the example of the simple lives they led and the homely truths they told, to set up a school of philosophy which had made Athens stare and Rome howl, and, I dare say, is causing the Old Continentals to turn over in their graves. The self-exploiting spectacle and bizarre teaching of this school passes the wit of man to fathom. Professing the ideal and proposing to recreate the Universe, the New Freedom, as it calls itself, would standardize it. The effect of that would be to desiccate the human species in human conceit. It would cheapen the very harps and halos in Heaven and convert the Day of Judgment into a moving picture show.

I protest that I am not of its kidney. In point of fact, its platitudes "stick in my gizzard." I belong the rather to those old-fashioned ones—

"Who love their land because it is their own, And scorn to give aught other reason why; Who'd shake hands with a king upon his throne, And think it kindness to his majesty."

I have many rights—birthrights—to speak of Kentucky as a Kentuckian, beside that of more than fifty years' service upon what may be fairly called the battle-line of the Dark and Bloody Ground.

My grandmother's father, William Mitchell Morrison, had raised a company of riflemen in the War of the Revolution, and, after the War, marched it westward. He commanded the troops in the old fort at Harrodsburg, where my grandmother was born in 1784. He died a general. My grandfather, James Black's father, the Rev. James Black, was chaplain of the fort. He remembered the birth of the baby girl who was to become his wife. He was a noble stalwart—a perfect type of the hunters of Kentucky—who could bring down a squirrel from the highest bough and hit a bull's eye at a hundred yards after he was three score and ten.

It was he who delighted my childhood with bear stories and properly lurid narrations of the braves in buckskin and the bucks in paint and feathers, with now and then a red-coat to give pungency and variety to the tale. He would sing me to sleep with hunting songs. He would take me with him afield to carry the game bag, and I was the only one of many grandchildren to be named in his will. In my thoughts and in my dreams he has been with me all my life, a memory and an example, and an ever glorious inspiration.

Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton were among my earliest heroes.



II

Born in a Democratic camp, and growing to manhood on the Democratic side of a political battlefield, I did not accept, as I came later to realize, the transcendent personal merit and public service of Henry Clay. Being of Tennessee parentage, perhaps the figure of Andrew Jackson came between; perhaps the rhetoric of Daniel Webster. Once hearing me make some slighting remark of the Great Commoner, my father, a life-long Democrat, who, on opposing sides, had served in Congress with Mr. Clay, gently rebuked me. "Do not express such opinions, my son," he said, "they discredit yourself. Mr. Clay was a very great man—a born leader of men."

It was certainly he, more than any other man, who held the Union together until the time arrived for Lincoln to save it.

I made no such mistake, however, with respect to Abraham Lincoln. From the first he appeared to me a great man, a born leader of men. His death proved a blow to the whole country—most of all to the Southern section of it. If he had lived there would have been no Era of Reconstruction, with its repressive agencies and oppressive legislation; there would have been wanting to the extremism of the time the bloody cue of his taking off to mount the steeds and spur the flanks of vengeance. For Lincoln entertained, with respect to the rehabilitation of the Union, the single wish that the Southern States—to use his homely phraseology—"should come back home and behave themselves," and if he had lived he would have made this wish effectual as he made everything else effectual to which he addressed himself.

His was the genius of common sense. Of perfect intellectual acuteness and aplomb, he sprang from a Virginia pedigree and was born in Kentucky. He knew all about the South, its institutions, its traditions and its peculiarities. He was an old-line Whig of the school of Henry Clay, with strong Emancipation leaning, never an Abolitionist. "If slavery be not wrong," he said, "nothing is wrong," but he also said and reiterated it time and again, "I have no prejudice against the Southern people. They are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist among them they would not introduce it. If it did now exist among us, we would not instantly give it up."

From first to last throughout the angry debates preceding the War of Sections, amid the passions of the War itself, not one vindictive, prescriptive word fell from his tongue or pen, whilst during its progress there was scarcely a day when he did not project his great personality between some Southern man or woman and danger.



III

There has been much discussion about what did and what did not occur at the famous Hampton Roads Conference. That Mr. Lincoln met and conferred with the official representatives of the Confederate Government, led by the Vice President of the Confederate States, when it must have been known to him that the Confederacy was nearing the end of its resources, is sufficient proof of the breadth both of his humanity and his patriotism. Yet he went to Fortress Monroe prepared not only to make whatever concessions toward the restoration of Union and Peace he had the lawful authority to make, but to offer some concessions which could in the nature of the case go no further at that time than his personal assurance. His constitutional powers were limited. But he was in himself the embodiment of great moral power.

The story that he offered payment for the slaves—so often affirmed and denied—is in either case but a quibble with the actual facts. He could not have made such an offer except tentatively, lacking the means to carry it out. He was not given the opportunity to make it, because the Confederate Commissioners were under instructions to treat solely on the basis of the recognition of the independence of the Confederacy. The conference came to nought. It ended where it began. But there is ample evidence that he went to Hampton Roads resolved to commit himself to that proposition. He did, according to the official reports, refer to it in specific terms, having already formulated a plan of procedure. This plan exists and may be seen in his own handwriting. It embraced a joint resolution to be submitted by the President to the two Houses of Congress appropriating $400,000,000 to be distributed among the Southern States on the basis of the slave population of each according to the Census of 1860, and a proclamation to be issued by himself, as President, when the joint resolution had been passed by Congress.

There can be no controversy among honest students of history on this point. That Mr. Lincoln said to Mr. Stephens, "Let me write Union at the top of this page and you may write below it whatever else you please," is referable to Mr. Stephens' statement made to many friends and attested by a number of reliable persons. But that he meditated the most liberal terms, including payment for the slaves, rests neither upon conjecture nor hearsay, but on documentary proof. It may be argued that he could not have secured the adoption of any such plan; but of his purpose, and its genuineness, there can be no question and there ought to be no equivocation.

Indeed, payment for the slaves had been all along in his mind. He believed the North equally guilty with the South for the original existence of slavery. He clearly understood that the Irrepressible Conflict was a Conflict of systems, not a merely sectional and partisan quarrel. He was a just man, abhorring proscription: an old Conscience Whig, indeed, who stood in awe of the Constitution and his oath of office. He wanted to leave the South no right to claim that the North, finding slave labor unremunerative, had sold its negroes to the South and then turned about and by force of arms confiscated what it had unloaded at a profit. He fully recognized slavery as property. The Proclamation of Emancipation was issued as a war measure. In his message to Congress of December, 1862, he proposed payment for the slaves, elaborating a scheme in detail and urging it with copious and cogent argument. "The people of the South," said he, addressing a Congress at that moment in the throes of a bloody war with the South, "are not more responsible for the original introduction of this property than are the people of the North, and, when it is remembered how unhesitatingly we all use cotton and sugar and share the profits of dealing in them, it may not be quite safe to say that the South has been more responsible than the North for its continuance."



IV

It has been my rule, aim and effort in my newspaper career to print nothing of a man which I would not say to his face; to print nothing of a man in malice; to look well and think twice before consigning a suspect to the ruin of printer's ink; to respect the old and defend the weak; and, lastly, at work and at play, daytime and nighttime, to be good to the girls and square with the boys, for hath it not been written of such is the kingdom of Heaven?

There will always be in a democracy two or more sets of rival leaders to two or more differing groups of followers. Hitherto history has classified these as conservatives and radicals. But as society has become more and more complex the groups have had their subdivisions. As a consequence speculative doctrinaries and adventurous politicians are enabled to get in their work of confusing the issues and exploiting themselves.

"'What are these fireworks for?' asks the rustic in the parable. 'To blind the eyes of the people,' answers the cynic."

I would not say aught in a spirit of hostility to the President of the United States. Woodrow Wilson is a clever speaker and writer. Yet the usual trend and phrase of his observations seem to be those of a special pleader, rather than those of a statesman. Every man, each of the nations, is for peace as an abstract proposition. That much goes without saying. But Mr. Wilson proposes to bind the hands of a giant and take lottery chances on the future. This, I think, the country will contest.

He is obsessed by the idea of a League of Nations. If not his own discovery he has yet made himself its leader. He talks flippantly about "American ideals" that have won the war against Germany, as if there were no English ideals and French ideals.

"In all that he does we can descry the school-master who arrived at the front rather late in life. One needs only to go over the record and mark how often he has reversed himself to detect a certain mental and temperamental instability clearly indicating a lack of fixed or resolute intellectual purpose. This is characteristic of an excess in education; of the half baked mind overtrained. The overeducated mind fancies himself a doctrinaire when he is in point of fact only a disciple."

Woodrow Wilson was born to the rather sophisticated culture of the too, too solid South. Had he grown up in England a hundred years ago he would have been a follower of the Della Cruscans. He has what is called a facile pen, though it sometimes runs away with him. It seems to have done so in the matter of the League of Nations. Inevitably such a scheme would catch the fancy of one ever on the alert for the fanciful.

I cannot too often repeat that the world we inhabit is a world of sin, disease and death. Men will fight whenever they want to fight, and no artificial scheme or process is likely to restrain them. It is mainly the costliness of war that makes most against it. But, as we have seen the last four years, it will not quell the passions of men or dull national and racial ambitions.

All that Mr. Wilson and his proposed League of Nations can do will be to revamp, and maybe for a while to reimpress the minds of the rank and file, until the bellowing followers of Bellona are ready to spring.

Eternal peace, universal peace, was not the purpose of the Deity in the creation of the universe.

Nevertheless, it would seem to be the duty of men in great place, as of us all, to proclaim the gospel of good will and cultivate the arts of fraternity. I have no quarrel with the President on this score. What I contest is the self-exploitation to which he is prone, so lacking in dignity and open to animadversion.



V

Thus it was that instant upon the appearance of the proposed League of Nations I made bold to challenge it, as but a pretty conceit having no real value, a serious assault upon our national sovereignty.

Its argument seemed to me full of copybook maxims, easier recited than applied. As what I wrote preceded the debates and events of the last six months, I may not improperly make the following quotation from a screed of mine appearing in The Courier-Journal of the 5th of March, 1919:

"The League of Nations is a fad. Politics, like society and letters, has its fads. In society they call them fashion and in literature originality. Politics gives the name of 'issues' to its fads. A taking issue is as a stunning gown, or 'a best seller.' The President's mind wears a coat of many colors, and he can change it at will, his mood being the objective point, not always too far ahead, or clear of vision. Carl Schurz was wont to speak of Gratz Brown as 'a man of thoughts rather than of ideas.' I wonder if that can be justly said of the President? 'Gentlemen will please not shoot at the pianiste,' adjured the superscription over the music stand in the Dakota dive; 'she is doing the best that she knows how.'

"Already it is being proclaimed that Woodrow Wilson can have a third nomination for the presidency if he wants it, and nobody seems shocked by it, which proves that the people grow degenerate and foreshadows that one of these nights some fool with a spyglass will break into Mars and let loose the myriads of warlike gyascutes who inhabit that freak luminary, thence to slide down the willing moonbeam and swallow us every one!

"In a sense the Monroe Doctrine was a fad. Oblivious to Canada, and British Columbia and the Spanish provinces, it warned the despots of Europe off the grass in America. We actually went to war with Mexico, having enjoyed two wars with England, and again and again we threatened to annex the Dominion. Everything betwixt hell and Halifax was Yankee preempted.

"Truth to say, your Uncle Samuel was ever a jingo. But your Cousin Woodrow, enlarging on the original plan, would stretch our spiritual boundaries to the ends of the earth and make of us the moral custodian of the universe. This much, no less, he got of the school of sweetness and light in which he grew up.

"I am a jingo myself. But a wicked material jingo, who wants facts, not theories. If I thought it possible and that it would pay, I would annex the North Pole and colonize the Equator. It is, after the manner of the lady in the play, that the President 'doth protest too much,' which displeases me and where, in point of fact, I 'get off the reservation.'

"That, being a politician and maybe a candidate, he is keenly alive to votes goes without saying. On the surface this League of Nations having the word 'peace' in big letters emblazoned both upon its forehead and the seat of its trousers—or, should I say, woven into the hem of its petticoat?—seems an appeal for votes. I do not believe it will bear discussion. In a way, it tickles the ear without convincing the sense. There is nothing sentimental about the actualities of Government, much as public men seek to profit by arousing the passions of the people. Government is a hard and fast and dry reality. At best statesmanship can only half do the things it would. Its aims are most assured when tending a little landward; its footing safest on its native heath. We have plenty to do on our own continent without seeking to right things on other continents. Too many of us—the President among the rest, I fear—miscalculate the distance between contingency and desire.

"'We figure to ourselves The thing we like: and then we build it up: As chance will have it on the rock or sand— When thought grows tired of wandering o'er the world, And homebound Fancy runs her bark ashore.'"

I am sorry to see the New York World fly off at a tangent about this latest of the Wilsonian hobbies. Frank Irving Cobb, the editor of the World, is, as I have often said, the strongest writer on the New York press since Horace Greeley. But he can hardly be called a sentimentalist, as Greeley was, and there is nothing but sentiment—gush and gammon—in the proposed League of Nations.

It may be all right for England. There are certainly no flies on it for France. But we don't need it. Its effects can only be to tie our hands, not keep the dogs away, and even at the worst, in stress of weather, we are strong enough to keep the dogs away ourselves.

We should say to Europe: "Shinny on your own side of the water and we will shinny on our side." It may be that Napoleon's opinion will come true that ultimately Europe will be "all Cossack or all republican." Part of it has come true already. Meanwhile it looks as though the United States, having exhausted the reasonable possibilities of democracy, is beginning to turn crank. Look at woman suffrage by Federal edict; look at prohibition by act of Congress and constitutional amendment; tobacco next to walk on the plank; and then!—Lord, how glad I feel that I am nearly a hundred years old and shall not live to see it!



Chapter the Thirty-First

The Age of Miracles—A Story of Franklin Pierce—Simon Suggs Billy Sunday—Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr—Certain Constitutional Shortcomings



I

The years intervening between 1865 and 1919 may be accounted the most momentous in all the cycles of the ages. The bells that something more than half a century ago rang forth to welcome peace in America have been from that day to this jangled out of tune and harsh with the sounding of war's alarms in every other part of the world. We flatter ourselves with the thought that our tragedy lies behind us. Whether this be true or not, the tragedy of Europe is at hand and ahead. The miracles of modern invention, surpassing those of old, have made for strife, not for peace. Civilization has gone backward, not forward. Rulers, intoxicated by the lust of power and conquest, have lost their reason, and nations, following after, like cattle led to slaughter, seem as the bereft of Heaven "that knew not God."

We read the story of our yesterdays as it unfolds itself in the current chronicle; the ascent to the bank-house, the descent to the mad-house, and, over the glittering paraphernalia that follows to the tomb, we reflect upon the money-zealot's progress; the dizzy height, the dazzling array, the craze for more and more and more; then the temptation and fall, millions gone, honor gone, reason gone—the innocent and the gentle, with the guilty, dragged through the mire of the prison, and the court—and we draw back aghast. Yet, if we speak of these things we are called pessimists.

I have always counted myself an optimist. I know that I do not lie awake nights musing on the ingratitude either of my stars or my countrymen. I pity the man who does. Looking backward, I have sincere compassion for Webster and for Clay! What boots it to them, now that they lie beneath the mold, and that the drums and tramplings of nearly seventy years of the world's strifes and follies and sordid ambitions and mean repinings, and longings, and laughter, and tears, have passed over their graves, what boots it to them, now, that they failed to get all they wanted? There is indeed snug lying in the churchyard; but the flowers smell as sweet and the birds sing as merry, and the stars look down as loving upon the God-hallowed mounds of the lowly and the poor, as upon the man-bedecked monuments of the Kings of men. All of us, the least with the greatest, let us hope and believe shall attain immortal life at last. What was there for Webster, what was there for Clay to quibble about? I read with a kind of wonder, and a sickening sense of the littleness of great things, those passages in the story of their lives where it is told how they stormed and swore, when tidings reached them that they had been balked of their desires.

Yet they might have been so happy; so happy in their daily toil, with its lofty aims and fair surroundings; so happy in the sense of duty done; so happy, above all, in their own Heaven-sent genius, with its noble opportunities and splendid achievements. They should have emulated the satisfaction told of Franklin Pierce. It is related that an enemy was inveighing against him, when an alleged friend spoke up and said: "You should not talk so about the President, I assure you that he is not at all the man you describe him to be. On the contrary, he is a man of the rarest gifts and virtues. He has long been regarded as the greatest orator in New England, and the greatest lawyer in New England, and surely no one of his predecessors ever sent such state papers to Congress."

"How are you going to prove it," angrily retorted the first speaker.

"I don't need to prove it," coolly replied the second. "He admits it."

I cannot tell just how I should feel if I were President, though, on the whole, I fancy fairly comfortable, but I am quite certain that I would not exchange places with any of the men who have been President, and I have known quite a number of them.



II

I am myself accused sometimes of being a "pessimist." Assuredly I am no optimist of the Billy Sunday sort, who fancies the adoption of the prohibition amendment the coming of "de jubilo." Early in life, while yet a recognized baseball authority, Mr. Sunday discovered "pay dirt" in what Col. Mulberry Sellers called "piousness." He made it an asset and began to issue celestial notes, countersigned by himself and made redeemable in Heaven. From that day to this he has been following the lead of the renowned Simon Suggs, who, having in true camp meeting style acquired "the grace of God," turned loose as an exhorter shouting "Step up to the mourner's bench, my brethering, step up lively, and be saved! I come in on na 'er par, an' see what I draw'd! Religion's the only game whar you can't lose. Him that trusts the Lord holds fo' aces!"

The Billy Sunday game has made Billy Sunday rich. Having exhausted Hell-fire-and-brimstone, the evangel turns to the Demon Rum. Satan, with hide and horns, has had his day. Prohibition is now the trick card.

The fanatic is never either very discriminating or very particular. As a rule, for him any taking "ism" will suffice. To-day, it happens to be "whisky." To-morrow it will be tobacco. Finally, having established the spy system and made house-to-house espionage a rule of conventicle, it will become a misdemeanor for a man to kiss his wife.

From fakers who have cards up their sleeves, not to mention snakes in their boots, we hear a great deal about "the people," pronounced by them as if it were spelled "pee-pul." It is the unfailing recourse of the professional politician in quest of place. Yet scarcely any reference, or referee, were faultier.

The people en masse constitute what we call the mob. Mobs have rarely been right—never except when capably led. It was the mob of Jerusalem that did the unoffending Jesus of Nazareth to death. It was the mob in Paris that made the Reign of Terror. Mobs have seldom been tempted, even had a chance to go wrong, that they have not gone wrong.

The "people" is a fetish. It was the people, misled, who precipitated the South into the madness of secession and the ruin of a hopelessly unequal war of sections. It was the people backing if not compelling the Kaiser, who committed hari-kari for themselves and their empire in Germany. It is the people leaderless who are making havoc in Russia. Throughout the length and breadth of Christendom, in all lands and ages, the people, when turned loose, have raised every inch of hell to the square foot they were able to raise, often upon the slightest pretext, or no pretext at all.

This is merely to note the mortal fallibility of man, most fallible when herded in groups and prone to do in the aggregate what he would hesitate to do when left to himself and his individual accountability.

Under a wise dispensation of power, despotism, we are told embodies the best of all government. The trouble is that despotism is seldom, if ever, wise. It is its nature to be inconsiderate, being essentially selfish, grasping and tyrannous. As a rule therefore revolution—usually of force—has been required to change or reform it. Perfectibility was not designed for mortal man. That indeed furnishes the strongest argument in favor of the immortality of the soul, life on earth but the ante-chamber of eternal life. It would be a cruel Deity that condemned man to the brief and vexed span of human existence with nothing beyond the grave.

We know not whence we came, or whither we go; but it is a fair guess that we shall in the end get better than we have known.



III

Historic democracy is dead.

This is not to say that a Democratic party organization has ceased to exist. Nor does it mean that there are no more Democrats and that the Democratic party is dead in the sense that the Federalist party is dead or the Whig party is dead, or the Greenback party is dead, or the Populist party is dead. That which has died is the Democratic party of Jefferson and Jackson and Tilden. The principles of government which they laid down and advocated have been for the most part obliterated. What slavery and secession were unable to accomplish has been brought about by nationalizing sumptuary laws and suffrage.

The death-blow to Jeffersonian democracy was delivered by the Democratic Senators and Representatives from the South and West who carried through the prohibition amendment. The coup de grace was administered by a President of the United States elected as a Democrat when he approved the Federal suffrage amendment to the Constitution.

The kind of government for which the Jeffersonian democracy successfully battled for more than a century was thus repudiated; centralization was invited; State rights were assassinated in the very citadel of State rights. The charter of local self-government become a scrap of paper, the way is open for the obliteration of the States in all their essential functions and the erection of a Federal Government more powerful than anything of which Alexander Hamilton dared to dream.

When the history of these times comes to be written it may be said of Woodrow Wilson: he rose to world celebrity by circumstance rather than by character. He was favored of the gods. He possessed a bright, forceful mind. His achievements were thrust upon him. Though it sometimes ran away with him, his pen possessed extraordinary facility. Thus he was ever able to put his best foot foremost. Never in the larger sense a leader of men as were Chatham and Fox, as were Washington, Clay and Lincoln; nor of ideas as were Rousseau, Voltaire and Franklin, he had the subtle tenacity of Louis the Eleventh of France, the keen foresight of Richelieu with a talent for the surprising which would have raised him to eminence in journalism. In short he was an opportunist void of conviction and indifferent to consistency.

The pen is mightier than the sword only when it has behind it a heart as well as a brain. He who wields it must be brave, upright and steadfast. We are giving our Chief Executive enormous powers. As a rule his wishes prevail. His name becomes the symbol of party loyalty. Yet it is after all a figure of speech not a personality that appeals to our sense of duty without necessarily engaging our affection.

Historic Republicanism is likewise dead, as dead as historic Democracy, only in both cases the labels surviving.



IV

We are told by Herbert Spencer that the political superstition of the past having been the divine right of kings, the political superstition of the present is the divine right of parliaments and he might have said of peoples. The oil of anointing seems unawares, he thinks, to have dripped from the head of the one upon the heads of the many, and given sacredness to them also, and to their decrees.

That the Proletariat, the Bolsheviki, the People are on the way seems plain enough. How far they will go, and where they will end, is not so clear. With a kind of education—most men taught to read, very few to think—the masses are likely to demand yet more and more for themselves. They will continue strenuously and effectively to resent the startling contrasts of fortune which aptitude and opportunity have created in a social and political structure claiming to rest upon the formula "equality for all, special privilege for none."

The law of force will yield to the rule of numbers. Socialism, disappointed of its Utopia, may then repeat the familiar lesson and reproduce the man-on-horseback, or the world may drop into another abyss, and, after the ensuing "dark ages," like those that swallowed Babylon and Tyre, Greece and Rome, emerge with a new civilization and religion.

"Man never is, but always to be blessed." We know not whence we came, or whither we go. Hope that springs eternal in the human breast tells us nothing. History seems, as Napoleon said, a series of lies agreed upon, yet not without dispute.



V

I read in an ultra-sectional non-partisan diatribe that "Jefferson Davis made Aaron Burr respectable," a sentence which clearly indicates that the writer knew nothing either of Jefferson Davis or Aaron Burr.

Both have been subjected to unmeasured abuse. They are variously misunderstood. Their chief sin was failure; the one to establish an impossible confederacy laid in human slavery, the other to achieve certain vague schemes of empire in Mexico and the far Southwest, which, if not visionary, were premature.

The final collapse of the Southern Confederacy can be laid at the door of no man. It was doomed the day of its birth. The wonder is that sane leaders could invoke such odds against them and that a sane people could be induced to follow. The single glory of the South is that it was able to stand out so long against such odds.

Jefferson Davis was a high-minded and well-intentioned man. He was chosen to lead the South because he was, in addition, an accomplished soldier. As one who consistently opposed him in his public policies, I can specify no act to the discredit of his character, his one serious mistake being his failure to secure the peace offered by Abraham Lincoln two short months before Appomattox.

Taking account of their personalities and the lives they led, there is little to suggest comparison, except that they were soldiers and Senators, who, each in his day, filled a foremost place in public affairs.

Aaron Burr, though well born and highly educated, was perhaps a rudely-minded man. But he was no traitor. If the lovely woman, Theodosia Prevost, whom he married, had lived, there is reason to believe that the whole course and tenor of his career would have been altered. Her death was an irreparable blow, as it were, a prelude to the series of mischances that followed. The death of their daughter, the lovely Theodosia Alston, completed the tragedy of his checkered life.

Born a gentleman and attaining soldierly distinction and high place, he fell a victim to the lure of a soaring ambition and the devious experience of a man about town.

The object of political proscription for all his intellectual and personal resources, he could not successfully meet and stand against it. There was nothing in the affair with Hamilton actually to damn and ruin him. Neither morally nor politically was Hamilton the better man of the two. Nor was there treason in his Mexican scheme. He meant no more with universal acclaim than Houston did three decades later. To couple his name with that of Benedict Arnold is historic sacrilege.

Jefferson pursued him relentlessly. But even Jefferson could not have destroyed him. When, after an absence of four years abroad, he returned to America, there was still a future for him had he stood up like a man, but, instead, like one confessing defeat, he sank down, whilst the wave of obloquy rolled over him.

His is one of the few pathetic figures in our national history. Mr. Davis has had plenty of defenders. Poor Burr has had scarcely an apologist. His offense, whatever it was, has been overpaid. Even the War of Sections begins to fade into the mist and become dreamlike even to those who bore an actual part in it.

The years are gliding swiftly by. Only a little while, and there shall not be one man living who saw service on either side of that great struggle of systems and ideas. Its passions long ago vanished from manly bosoms. That has come to pass within a single generation in America which in Europe required ages to accomplish.

There is no disputing the verdict of events. Let us relate them truly and interpret them fairly. If the South would have the North do justice to its heroes, the South must do justice to the heroes of the North. Each must render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's even as each would render unto God the things that are God's. As living men, standing erect in the presence of Heaven and the world, the men of the South have grown gray without being ashamed; and they need not fear that History will fail to vindicate their integrity.

When those are gone that fought the battle, and Posterity comes to strike the balance, it will be shown that the makers of the Constitution left the relation of the States to the Federal Government and of the Federal Government to the States open to a double construction. It will be told how the mistaken notion that slave labor was requisite to the profitable cultivation of sugar, rice and cotton, raised a paramount property interest in the Southern section of the Union, whilst in the Northern section, responding to the trend of modern thought and the outer movements of mankind, there arose a great moral sentiment against slavery. The conflict thus established, gradually but surely sectionalizing party lines, was as inevitable as it was irrepressible. It was fought out to its bitter and logical conclusion at Appomattox. It found us a huddle of petty sovereignties, held together by a rope of sand. It made and it left us a Nation.



Chapter the Thirty-Second

A War Episode—I Meet my Fater—I Marry and Make a Home—The Ups and Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age



I

In bringing these desultory—perhaps too fragmentary—recollections to a close the writer may not be denied his final word. This shall neither be self-confident nor overstated; the rather a confession of faith somewhat in rejection of political and religious pragmatism. In both his experience has been ample if not exhaustive. During the period of their serial publication he has received many letters—suggestive, informatory and critical—now and again querulous—which he has not failed to consider, and, where occasion seemed to require, to pursue to original sources in quest of accuracy. In no instance has he found any essential error in his narrative. Sometimes he has been charged with omissions—as if he were writing a history of his own times—whereas he has been only, and he fears, most imperfectly, relating his immediate personal experience.

I was born in the Presbyterian Church, baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, educated in the Church of England in America and married into the Church of the Disciples. The Roman Catholic baptism happened in this way: It was my second summer; my parents were sojourning in the household of a devout Catholic family; my nurse was a fond, affectionate Irish Catholic; the little life was almost despaired of, so one sunny day, to rescue me from that form of theologic controversy known as infant damnation, the baby carriage was trundled round the corner to Saint Matthew's Church—it was in the national capital—and the baby brow was touched with holy water out of a font blessed of the Virgin Mary. Surely I have never felt or been the worse for it.

Whilst I was yet too young to understand I witnessed an old-fashioned baptism of the countryside. A person who had borne a very bad character in the neighborhood was being immersed. Some one, more humorous than reverent, standing near me, said as the man came to the surface, "There go his sins, men and brethren, there go his sins"; and having but poor eyesight I thought I saw them passing down the stream never to trouble him, or anybody, more. I can see them still floating, floating down the stream, out and away from the sight of men. Does this make me a Baptist, I wonder?

I fear not, I fear not; because I am unable to rid myself of the impression that there are many roads leading to heaven, and I have never believed in what is called close communion. I have not hated and am unable to hate any man because either in political or in religious opinion he differs from me and insists upon voting his party ticket and worshiping his Creator according to his conscience. Perfect freedom of conscience and thought has been my lifelong contention.

I suppose I must have been born an insurrecto. Pursuing the story of the dark ages when men were burnt at the stake for the heresy of refusing to bow to the will of the majority, it is not the voice of the Protestant or the Catholic that issues from the flames and reaches my heart, but the cry of suffering man, my brother. To me a saint is a saint whether he wears wooden shoes or goes barefoot, whether he gets his baptism silently out of a font of consecrated water or comes dripping from the depths of the nearest brook, shouting, "Glory hallelujah!" From my boyhood the persecution of man for opinion's sake—and no matter for what opinion's sake—has roused within me the only devil I have ever personally known.

My reading has embraced not a few works which seek or which affect to deal with the mystery of life and death. Each and every one of them leaves a mystery still. For all their learning and research—their positivity and contradiction—none of the writers know more than I think I know myself, and all that I think I know myself may be abridged to the simple rescript, I know nothing. The wisest of us reck not whence we came or whither we go; the human mind is unable to conceive the eternal in either direction; the soul of man inscrutable even to himself.

The night has a thousand eyes, The day but one; Yet the light of the bright world dies With the dying sun.

The mind has a thousand eyes, The heart but one; Yet the light of a whole life dies When love is done.

All that there is to religion, therefore, is faith; not much more in politics. We are variously told that the church is losing its hold upon men. If it be true it is either that it gives itself over to theology—the pride of opinion—or yields itself to the celebration of the mammon of unrighteousness.

I do not believe that it is true. Never in the history of the world was Jesus of Nazareth so interesting and predominant. Between Buddha, teaching the blessing of eternal sleep, and Christ, teaching the blessing of eternal life, mankind has been long divided, but slowly, surely, the influence of the Christ has overtaken that of the Buddha until that portion of the world which has advanced most by process of evolution from the primal state of man now worships at the shrine of Christ and him risen from the dead, not at the sign of Buddha and total oblivion.

The blessed birthright from God, the glory of heaven, the teaching and example of the Prince of Peace—have been engulfed beneath oceans of ignorance and superstition through two thousand years of embittered controversy. During the dark ages coming down even to our own time the very light of truth was shut out from the eyes and hearts and minds of men. The blood of the martyrs we were assured in those early days was the seed of the church. The blood of the martyrs was the blood of man—weak, cruel, fallible man, who, whether he got his inspiration from the Tiber or the Rhine, from Geneva, from Edinburgh or from Rome, did equally the devil's work in God's name. None of the viceregents of heaven, as they claimed to be, knew much or seemed to care much about the word of the Gentle One of Bethlehem, whom they had adopted as their titular divinity much as men in commerce adopt a trade-mark.



II

It was knock-down and drag-out theology, the ruthless machinery of organized churchism—the rank materialism of things temporal—not the teachings of Christ and the spirit of the Christian religion—which so long filled the world with blood and tears.

I have often in talking with intelligent Jews expressed a wonder that they should stigmatize the most illustrious Jew as an impostor, saying to them: "What matters it whether Jesus was of divine or human parentage—a human being or an immortal spirit? He was a Jew: a glorious, unoffending Jew, done to death by a mob of hoodlums in Jerusalem. Why should not you and I call him Master and kneel together in love and pity at his feet?"

Never have I received any satisfying answer. Partyism—churchism—will ever stick to its fetish. Too many churches—or, shall I say, church fabrics—breeding controversy where there should be agreement, each sect and subdivision fighting phantoms of its fancy. In the city that once proclaimed itself eternal there is war between the Quirinal and the Vatican, the government of Italy and the papal hierarchy. In France the government of the republic and the Church of Rome are at daggers-drawn. Before the world-war England and Germany—each claiming to be Protestant—were looking on askance, irresolute, not as to which side might be right and which wrong, but on which side "is my bread to be buttered?" In America, where it was said by the witty Frenchmen we have fifty religions and only one soup, there are people who think we should begin to organize to stop the threatened coming of the Pope, and such like! "O Liberty," cried Madame Roland, "how many crimes are committed in thy name!" "O Churchism," may I not say, "how much nonsense is trolled off in thy name!"

I would think twice before trusting the wisest and best of men with absolute power; but I would trust never any body of men—never any Sanhedrim, consistory, church congress or party convention—with absolute power. Honest men are often led to do or to assent, in association, what they would disdain upon their conscience and responsibility as individuals. En masse extremism generally prevails, and extremism is always wrong; it is the more wrong and the more dangerous because it is rarely wanting for plausible sophistries, furnishing congenial and convincing argument to the mind of the unthinking for whatever it has to propose.



III

Too many churches and too much partyism! It is love—love through grace of God—truth where we can find it—which shall irradiate the life that is. If when we have prepared ourselves for the life to come love be wanting, nothing else is much worth while. Not alone the love of man for woman, but the love of woman for woman and of man for man; the divine fraternity taught us by the Sermon on the Mount; the religion of giving, not of getting; of whole-hearted giving; of joy in the love and the joy of others.

Who giveth himself with his alms feeds three— Himself, his hungering neighbor and Me.

For myself I can truthfully subscribe to the formula: "I believe in God the Father Almighty; Maker of heaven and earth. And Jesus Christ, his only Son, who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried; He descended into hell, the third day He rose again from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and sitteth at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty; from thence He shall come to judge the quick and the dead."

That is my faith. It is my religion. It was my cradle song. It may not be, dear ones of contrariwise beliefs, your cradle song or your belief, or your religion. What boots it? Can you discover another in word and deed, in luminous, far-reaching power of speech and example, to walk by the side of this the Anointed One of your race and of my belief?

As the Irish priest said to the British prelate touching the doctrine of purgatory: "You may go further and fare worse, my lord," so may I say to my Jewish friends—"Though the stars in their courses lied to the Wise Men of the desert, the bloody history of your Judea, altogether equal in atrocity to the bloody history of our Christendom, has yet to fulfill the promise of a Messiah—and were it not well for those who proclaim themselves God's people to pause and ask, 'Has He not arisen already?'"

I would not inveigh against either the church or its ministry; I would not stigmatize temporal preaching; I would have ministers of religion as free to discuss the things of this world as the statesmen and the journalists; but with this difference: That the objective point with them shall be the regeneration of man through grace of God and not the winning of office or the exploitation of parties and newspapers. Journalism is yet too unripe to do more than guess at truth from a single side. The statesman stands mainly for political organism. Until he dies he is suspect. The pulpit remains therefore still the moral hope of the universe and the spiritual light of mankind.

It must be nonpartisan. It must be nonprofessional. It must be manly and independent. But it must also be worldy-wise, not artificial, sympathetic, broad-minded and many-sided, equally ready to smite wrong in high places and to kneel by the bedside of the lowly and the poor.

I have so found most of the clergymen I have known, the exceptions too few to remember. In spite of the opulence we see about us let us not take to ourselves too much conceit. May every pastor emulate the virtues of that village preacher of whom it was written that:

Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools who came to scoff, remained to pray.

* * * * *

A man he was to all the country dear, And passing rich with forty pounds a year.

* * * * *

His house was known to all the vagrant train, He chid their wanderings, but relieved their pain; The long-remembered beggar was his guest, Whose beard descending swept his aged breast; The ruined spendthrift, now no longer proud, Claimed kindred there, and had his claims allowed; The broken soldier, kindly bade to stay, Sate by the fire, and talked the night away; Wept o'er his wounds, or, tales of sorrow done, Shouldered his crutch, and showed how fields were won. Pleased with his guests, the good man learned to glow, And quite forgot their vices in their woe; Careless their merits or their faults to scan, His pity gave ere charity began.



IV

I have lived a long life—rather a happy and a busy than a merry one—enjoying where I might, but, let me hope I may fairly claim, shirking no needful labor or duty. The result is some accretions to my credit. It were, however, ingratitude and vanity in me to set up exclusive ownership of these. They are the joint products and property of my dear wife and myself.

I do not know just what had befallen if love had failed me, for as far back as I can remember love has been to me the bedrock of all that is worth living for, striving for or possessing in this cross-patch of a world of ours.

I had realized the meaning of it in the beautiful concert of affection between my father and mother, who lived to celebrate their golden wedding. My wife and I have enjoyed now the like conjugal felicity fifty-four—counted to include two years of betrothal, fifty-six years. Never was a young fellow more in love than I—never has love been more richly rewarded—yet not without some heartbreaking bereavements.

I met the woman who was to become my wife during the War of Sections—amid its turmoil and peril—and when at its close we were married, at Nashville, Tennessee, all about us was in mourning, the future an adventure. It was at Chattanooga, the winter of 1862-63, that fate brought us together and riveted our destinies. She had a fine contralto voice and led the church choir. Doctor Palmer, of New Orleans, was on a certain Sunday well into the long prayer of the Presbyterian service. Bragg's army was still in middle Tennessee. There was no thought of an attack. Bang! Bang! Then the bursting of a shell too close for comfort. Bang! Bang! Then the rattle of shell fragments on the roof. On the other side of the river the Yankees were upon us.